I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

Warning, Executives: Avoid Social Media at Your Peril

I’ve noticed that my 18-month-old grand-daughter already knows ‘the swipe.’ If you hand her an iPhone-like object, including her play telephone, she’ll swipe her index finger across it, expecting it to respond.

photo courtesy of Sergej Khakimullin

This new technology, which I still find somewhat gee-whiz-ish and amazing, will be as ho-hum to her as television is to me, as radio was to my mom, and – I suspect – as the telegraph was to my grandmother.

It’s possible to become proficient in the technologies that come into common usage when we’re adults — but they feel like a ‘second language’ to us. The main place I see this lately is in the realm of social media. For my daughter, and my assistant, and other people I know in their 20s and 30s, using social media is part of their native language. They built websites in college (or even high school); they explore and evolve their use of facebook and/or twitter and/or Pinterest and/or iGoogle as easily as they change clothes. I feel relatively comfortable in all these places – probably more comfortable and fluent than many people my age – but it’s not native to me in the way it is to them.

And I notice the same lack of ease and fluency in my clients, most of whom are in their mid-forties to mid-sixties. Of course everybody uses email, and google or yahoo for search – it would be hard to function in daily business life otherwise – but most executives, at least those I know, think of social media as just one more thing people are telling them they ought to be doing.

In fact, I recently conducted a meeting where a 50-something media executive pooh-poohed the idea (which was coming from two 30ish folks in the room) that ratings for their TV shows could be driven significantly by including a simultaneous online interactive component. “I know people do stuff online while they watch TV,” he said, “But I don’t think the two are connected.” His young colleagues simply stared at him in disbelief, as though he had just asserted that the earth is the center of the universe. I could tell they had no idea where or how to start explaining to him the depth of his wrongness, from their view of the world.

Fellow boomers: if we want to operate in today’s business world, I believe we must learn enough social media to get by in a world of – increasingly – native speakers. If that’s true, then the question is, given everything else we have to do, how do we make social media part of our toolkit?

My husband sent me this great article from the WSJ the other day. It’s by Alexandra Samuel, an impressive young woman who is clearly a social media native. In the article, Dr. Samuel offers a number of excellent, practical suggestions for executives to use social media as a means to achieving their existing goals, vs. thinking about social media as simply one more big, time-wasting, irritating thing to have to ‘get into.’

For example, executives I know often complain about how hard it is to stay up-to-date on industry trends or to keep their leadership and management skills fresh. Samuels suggests using iGoogle or Flipboard to create a daily, self-curated ‘dashboard’ of the things most interesting and useful to you: she recommends subscribing “to a range of blogs, columnists and news searches that offer insights into new leadership models, profiles of high-functioning executives, academic research…and summaries of the latest business books.”

Another common complaint from executives I coach: they don’t have the time or energy to connect with and learn from their peers. Samuels suggests selecting a handful of folks with whom you most want to stay in touch, whose insights and activities you find most inspiring and useful, and then to “make this list of people the first thing you look at when you catch up on any of your social networks, so that you know what they are thinking about, reading, and dealing with in their own working lives.”

An even more practical suggestion for using social media to improve your effectiveness: use the many planning and organizing tools available online (Mindmeister, Basecamp) to make the complex, collaboration-based projects on your plate more doable.

As someone who is continually working on learning to speak social media more fluently, and to integrate its power into my life on a variety of levels, I found the article (and her website) extraordinarily helpful. For those of us who are in our forties, fifties or sixties (and beyond) and wanting to operate effectively in the world we live in, social media is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a must.

They say the best way to learn a language is total immersion — so grab hold of some native speakers and take the plunge.

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It is such a great opportunity for any executive to participate..he/she has a plethora of trained employees and resources at a beckon call. What I would give to have that expert ability at my fingertips on a daily basis to teach and guide me in the learning process. Carpe diem executives.

Totally agree – and for execs to learn about social media from their younger employees would probably also provide opportunities for the senior people to learn lots of other stuff from the junior folks…

I would also add that you can always make use of ‘dead time’, stuck in a queue, waiting etc as your social media time. With mobile apps for twitter, facebook, linkedin, hootsuite etc, you can stay connected and collaborate at times when you would be otherwise frustrated that you are not being productive.

Enjoyed both your article and the WSJ article you pointed to. It’s a challenge to help people understand the value social media can add to their already hectic schedules. A good tip.. executives/managers tend to spend a fair amount of time traveling. An airport or on the airplane is a perfect time to craft that blog post you’ve been meaning to get to.

social media is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a must to have platform for anybody who is open to learn and evolve. Some messages provide instant insights that effect a change in perceptions of an open being.

Do you feel that you are out of touch as a corporate leader when dealing with younger generations of prospective customers and employees? Well, have no fear! Just adapt to the culture of the younger generation to keep your companies relevant and retain customers along with a competitive staff.

Teach your management the Formula for Success: The formula for both personal and corporate success = your human capital (what you know and can do) times your social capital (who you know and who knows you) times your reputation (who trusts you).

The social capital that accrues from such “nonessential” parts of work turns out to be quite essential indeed. One study yielded the following description of managers who advanced rapidly in hierarchies: Fast-track managers “spent relatively more time and effort socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders than did their less successful counterparts…[and]…did not give much time or attention to the traditional management activities of planning, decision making, and controlling or to the human resource management activities of motivating/reinforcing, staffing, training/developing, and managing conflict.”

This suggests that social capital is even more necessary to managers’ advancement than skillful performance of traditional managerial tasks.

I agree that social capital is key to advancement, and that getting familiar with and using social media is an important component of that. However, advancement isn’t the only goal – building great teams of people who trust and will support you is essential to real results.